Based on request from community, I took some time to do recording of the material related on the SharePoint 2013 site provisioning techniques. This recording is essentially covering the techniques introduced on following previously released blog post.

[Updated on 9th of September with link to download the video for offline viewing]

Video covers following patterns and explains how they work and where they are available. Not actually deep diving on them, but covering them in high level one-by-one.

Feature stapling

Site definitions

Site templates

Web templates

Remove provisioning with SP Apps

I also embedded the remote provisioning demo directly to this video, which was also included in the original blog post. Notice that used code in the demo is also available for download from following link

Can you use remote provisioning from sharepoint apps to create personal (mysites)? How do you override the call to the standard personal sites creation? Do you know if there are any sample code or development walkthrough examples?

I would like for the provisioning to be like that for all subsites that the user creates within a site collection, even if the user creates a whole tree of subsites. Is it possible to replace the "new subsite" link in newly provisioned subsites as well?

that's actually exactly what's being done in the demo as well – demo concentrates on creation of sub sites and to override the create site link. Latest version of the this sample is available from the http://officeams.codeplex.com and is named as Contoso.SubSiteTemplates.

Vesa, What would you recommend if I wanted to replicate the timer job scenario in Office 365? Could you hook the provisioning code into a custom workflow attached to the list which stores the site requests?

you can use the code what we have now released in open source Office 365 Developer Patterns and Practices project at github.com/…/PnP and more specifically the model with async site collection creation for Office 365, which is in here – github.com/…/Provisioning.Cloud.Async

Notice that this particular sample has also video walkthrough at the Channel 9. Link is in the project ream me page located in the above link.

for anyone who is looking for a comprehensive solution which will enable SharePoint self – service provisioning with built in SharePoint governance controls, i would like to encourage to explore AvePoint’s Governance Automation Framework.